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I had a thought about encoding a very small amount of data onto some kind of "disk" using 3D printing as the mechanism for filament-based storage. The assumption was that using common 3D printer measurement tools (like for bed-leveling) would provide a way to read back whatever data was encoded onto the surface.

Since that seems like a pretty well-known concept, crudely applied to a domain I haven't seen it in before - but is already large and growing fast - I'm assuming that others have thought of this? I was hoping maybe someone had implemented something like it? And then, obviously, if that proof of concept exists, I'd wonder about some kind of advanced version that used specialized equipment for the reading (and possibly the writing/printing).

In any case, I'm just curious. I was thinking about long term (century +) archival storage, or encryption keys only stored as the print with no digital copies. Stuff that wouldn't need tons of storage, but would be crucial to maintain statically. It probably wouldn't be useful for that, which is why I assume I'm not finding much in my searches for it. But I was just wondering if anyone knew about it, in case there is stuff it's good for.

13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].

For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.

I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.

Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."

No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.

I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.

This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.

Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.

In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081

I guess making a decent living for solo developers from either apps or games was already extremely difficult. But with agentic coding, I feel it has now become almost impossible.

That has also kind of removed my interest in side projects too, because there is probably no more chance of making any money from them, unless you are good at marketing.

What is the opinion here?

We recently did a deep dive into our engineering time allocation for a standard 5-person team building a B2B SaaS application. The results were pretty depressing: we spent roughly 960 hours (annualized) on "setup" tasks—environment config, auth flows, RBAC, CI/CD pipelines, and database scaffolding—before we built a single unique feature that actually differentiated the product.

I’m sharing this because I think we’ve become numb to the "Setup Tax" in web development. We assume it's just the cost of doing business, but when you look at the economics, it’s a disaster.

The problem isn't just "writing boilerplate." It's the decision fatigue and integration cost that comes with it. Even with modern frameworks, we found that for a standard CRUD app, about 80% of our engineering effort went into the "commodity layer"—the stuff that every SaaS has, but no customer pays for. Only 20% went into the unique business logic.

We tried to fix this by throwing more bodies at it, but that just increased coordination overhead. So we tried something different: instead of using AI to write code snippets (Copilot style), we used it to generate the entire architectural foundation at once. I'm talking about the full repo structure, the Docker configs, the auth integration, the API gateways—the whole boring 80%.

The goal was to invert that ratio. To get to a point where 70% of our time is on features and only 30% on glue code.

The results from our initial runs suggest it works, but the math is what’s interesting. Moving from 20% feature focus to 70% feature focus isn't just a linear improvement. It’s a 3.5x multiplier on feature velocity. The total lines of code produced might be similar, but the amount of valuable code shipping to production skyrockets.

Obviously, there are massive trade-offs here.

First, you end up with a very generic architecture initially. If you need something novel or specialized (like high-frequency trading or deep tech), this approach is useless. It only works for the "standard web app" pattern.

Second, there's a real risk of "black box" infrastructure. If the team doesn't understand the generated auth flow, they can't debug it when it inevitably breaks. We have to enforce strict governance to stop this from becoming generated spaghetti.

Third, I'm not sure if this efficiency holds up long-term. Maintenance is always the real killer, not day-one setup. We haven't been doing this long enough to see if the generated foundations rot faster than bespoke ones.

I'm curious what others are seeing:

- Does anyone else track "time to first feature"? - What is your ratio of infrastructure/boilerplate vs. actual business logic? - Have internal developer platforms (IDPs) actually solved this for you, or did they just hide the maintenance cost elsewhere?

It feels like we're at a weird inflection point where "starting from scratch" is becoming economically irresponsible for standard software, but the alternative feels like cheating.

I’ve been building multi-step AI workflows with multiple agents (planning, reasoning, tool use, etc.), and I sometimes run into cases where the final output is incorrect even though nothing technically fails. There are no runtime errors - just wrong results.

The main challenge is figuring out where things went wrong. The issue could be in an early reasoning step, how context is passed between steps, or a subtle mistake that propagates through the system. By the time I see the final output, it’s not obvious which step caused the problem.

I’ve been using Langfuse for tracing, which helps capture inputs and outputs, but in practice I still end up manually inspecting each step one by one to diagnose issues, which gets tiring quickly.

I’m curious how others are approaching this. Are there better ways to structure or instrument these workflows to make failures easier to localize? Any patterns, tools, or techniques that have worked well for you?

I see it more and more in email, Slack, text, etc: People too scared to share their own thoughts so they AI-wash it and send an exhausting page of "It's not X, it's Y!" slop instead.

I'm not the CEO, I can't order people to stop. The CEO does it too.

I try talking to people directly, but people get defensive and there's always the chance they didn't use AI. I need indirect means of socializing change.

Looking for anything I can use to socialize against AI-washing: Articles, memes, policies that other companies have successfully used- whatever.

At my large tech company, we're all being pushed to use AI. I, and most people I work with, have had success using the chatbots and Cursor-style tools and more recently Claude Code to accelerate the process of writing code.

Yet, with a few people in my network, it's like they're living 10 years ahead. Guys are automating everything in their jobs, spinning up 10 specialized agents at a time and running multi-agent pipelines, just doing all sorts of crazy things with this tech that I just can't even fathom. It seems like it's making them way more productive.

I have found a way to fit code-writing and question-answering chatbots into my workflow. I have NOT done the same in terms of these crazy Agent setups. There's clearly a way to leverage these tools to turbocharge your productivity, like at least 2x or maybe even 10x. But what is it?

Are there any Agentic power users out there who can enlighten me? What are the best ways to take advantage of these new tools?

I’ve been working at YC-backed startups since graduating from university. I’m now at a company building a deeply distributed systems product, and I’m surrounded by incredibly talented engineers who seem exceptionally strong at what they do. They often have knowledge and intuition about things I barely understand.

Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.

On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?

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Someone I know just had their Google account compromised, but the normal recovery methods don't work for an interesting reason: the attacker has made the account into a "child" account subordinate to an attacker-controlled "parent" account. This apparently blocks the ability to use any of the Google account recovery methods (backup phone number or email address etc) without parental consent.

Apparently this person I know isn't alone, if you search you can find other people reporting they've been victims of this. And of course, Google support is nonexistent for ordinary users, so there's no real recourse. Let this be a warning about the consequences of ill-thought-out "child safety features"?

I stopped my CC Max plan a few months ago, but I'm trying it again for fun after seeing their $30 billion series G or whatever.

It just doesn't work. I'm trying to build a simple tool that will let me visualize grid layouts.

It needs to toggle between landscape/portrait, and implement some design strategies so I can see different visualizations of the grid. I asked it to give me a slider to simulate the number of grids.

1st pass, it made something, but it was squished. And toggling between landscape and portrait made it so it squished itself the other way so I couldn't even see anything.

2nd pass, syntax error.

3rd try I ask it to redo everything from scratch. It now has a working slider, but the landscape/portrait is still broken.

4th try, it manages to fix the landscape/portrait issue, but now the issue is that the controls are behind the display so I have to reload the page.

5th try, it manages to fix this issue, but now it is squished again.

6th try, I ask it to try again from scratch. This time it gives me a syntax error.

This is so frustrating.

Watching my elderly mother trying to accomplish something on the internet and I have to say ...

Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.

It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.

I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.

It makes me so angry.

So. Angry.

Querying

https://www.google.com/search?q=polymarket

in Australia leads straight to a crypto scam. The scam website (polymarkets.*) seems to be 'organically' on the top. Perhaps this is because polymarket is banned in Aus?

When companies push, advertise, and promote that they are or were voted a "best place to work", is that a red flag when considering to work there? I feel like it's more about convincing current workers than anything. Thoughts?

I built Picknar as a lightweight tool to extract YouTube thumbnail images in max resolution without requiring login, extensions, or third-party API keys.

The main focus was performance and simplicity:

No account required

Direct thumbnail extraction

Supports Shorts

Minimal frontend dependencies

Optimized for fast response time

The idea came after noticing that most similar tools were either overloaded with ads, slow, or required unnecessary steps.

I’d appreciate feedback on:

UX improvements

Technical architecture decisions

Monetization approach (currently ad-supported)

Long-term defensibility in a competitive niche

Happy to answer questions about implementation or tradeoffs.

Grand Time 1.0: frozen research spec with time as non-monetary latent accounting primitive, governance-free.

Invariants via formulas: 333-day stability, mint coverage gates, Time Capital activation (no price impact), multi-asset liquidity/emergency segregation.

No tokens/investments/production — research artifacts only.

Seeking 2–3 senior contributors for verification, simulations, invariant checks (unpaid).

Details: https://github.com/ArturGrandi/gt1-implementation-reference/issues/1 Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18190386 EF ESP submission for GT 2.0 track.

Open to discussion.

I'm trying to decide whether to adopt Cursor for our company, but we're in a heavily regulated industry and our compliance team is flagging concerns about HIPAA/SOC2/audit trails.

The thing is, there are companies in regulated industries using it [1][2]. But Cursor has no HIPAA BAA, no FedRAMP certification, and is cloud-only with all requests routing through their AWS infrastructure. (This is probably true for Claude and other coding assistants, though I've only looked seriously at Cursor.)

So how are regulated companies actually making this work? Or do most just avoid Cursor and other AI coding tools altogether?

[1] 165 healthcare companies use Cursor according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/cursor/

[2] Cursor's customers include Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Neuralink: https://cursor.com/customers

I watch one Steve jobs video all year, happens to be last week. I don't need 30% of recommendations to be related to Steve Jobs from here on out.

For example, greenfield advice like: "prefer clear over clever code. Strive for maintainable, simple and testable code etc".

Do these kind of vague advice make sense to have on an AGENTS.md file? And if so, any reason to not have it in the global one?

Hi,

A few months ago, I came across a personal blog here on HN with the main feature being about ~4 sliders that change the weights of all posts and rank them in real time. I think some of the sliders were for "popularity", "recency" and perhaps "author's score". I also think, but I'm not sure, that the blog featured general ML topics.

I played with the sliders for sometime and had a great time exploring the blog, but I have since failed to find it again. I should've bookmark it then.

Does anyone have some clue about it? Much appreciated

Does anyone have a source on info for the 1982 Apple 2 video game Abuse? The web/ChatGPT seem to think it never existed. Here is an eBay link to an old disk: https://www.ebay.com/itm/306072842554

If you can code practically anything with Claude Code (or equivalents), what types of web businesses will continue to stay viable or profitable?

Source: AI is Killing Saas - https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2b-saas

Isn’t stripes job to simply process payments? What kind of liability would stripe need to account for any merchant processing 1$ on its behalf?

The newest version of 145.0.3800.58-1 of microsoft-edge-stable changes the repo to download further updates from to https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ At the moment this fails for me because I don't have Google's public key installed. But I doubt the URL is correct in the first place.

I guess Microsoft copies the maintainer scripts from Google's Chrome and forgot to patch the repo URL.

Yeah, I would not use any software from that supplier if my employer did not force me to...

Many hn users often partially talk about their use case of AI. Orchestrating agents, managing code and PRs. But they rarely talk about the project itself.

If you have any of those projects, or just heavily AI assisted project, please share it here.

Hi

I’m curious if anyone here has successfully moved to using a dumb phone. By dumb phone - I mean literally texting / calling only. No internet, etc.

Immediate isssues I see is not being able to use Authenticator apps. Not being able to use maps. Etc.

Has anyone made the switch and how to best go about it?

I'm curious what HN's experiences are with using LLMs for reading and comprehending papers and textbooks. Do you use special tools that make the process easier? Do they work?

I'm thinking of a book that you can ask questions. It can explain topics in more detail, or it can tell you that the thing you asked will be explained later in the book. And it will allow you to skip material that you are already familiar with. Provide references to other resources, etc.

Maybe ingesting an entire book is too much for current LLMs, but I'm sure there are ways around that.

Note: I am __not__ trying to build such a tool myself.

I'm looking for research papers you consider exceptionally well written. I want to share them with students and colleagues as examples of good technical writing. Honestly, I'd love to point back to this thread so it's not just me saying it.

I keep hearing we’re in an AI bubble, but I’m struggling to visualize the day after scenario.

If the bubble pops (meaning these massive compute costs never turn into actual profits and the VC money dries up) what does the tech landscape look like?

A lot of us use Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT daily for coding and docs. If the subsidized cheap access vanishes because these companies can't eat the losses anymore, do the tools just disappear? Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who lived through 2000 or 2008. Does a postbubble world mean we just abandon the tech entirely or is it a move toward expensive solutions?